Sunshine - your post "Where to start?" is really hitting home right now.  I'm trying to complete my final project for class and feel overwhelmed.  There are so many potential angles to this problem, that I'm having a hard time selecting just one that I can hope to finish in a month, and to expand for a preliminary and possibly a thesis.  So many people have published papers on these topics (articulated bodies, non-rigid motion, pose estimation, kinematics) and most of them contain equations for which I have no clue how they are derived or applied to the problem at hand.  It seems that I don't even known the ABC's of the field yet, let alone that I'm ready to offer novel contributions to the field.